“Oh?” Reynolds scratched Blue behind the ears and about the head.
“The daughters were seventeen and fourteen when their father took his life. They never knew why he did it.”
“He didn’t leave a note, then.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“A terrible thing,” Reynolds said.
“You can’t imagine unless you’ve gone through it,” Tracy said. “We like to believe our parents are perfect, but then you realize they’re human, with all the same faults and imperfections. I think that’s the hardest thing to accept.”
“You have personal experience.”
“My father shot himself.”
“I’m sorry.” Reynolds continued to pet his dogs. His right foot bounced rhythmically.
“Darren was in therapy at the time he killed himself.” Tracy paused, making sure she had eye contact. “The therapist kept a file. The family had never asked to see it. You can imagine. On the one hand, it could provide answers; on the other, it could reveal faults and imperfections. They’d decided to move on. Only they found that it wasn’t so simple to just move on from something that traumatic. Their father certainly couldn’t. Neither, apparently, could Archibald Coe. Hastey doesn’t appear to have either, and, despite appearances, I don’t believe you have.”
“I can assure you I don’t know what you’re talking about, Detective.” Reynolds didn’t sound defiant. He sounded tired.
“Yes, you do, Mr. Reynolds. Because I have Darren Gallentine’s file, and he told his therapist what happened the night Kimi Kanasket died. I’m talking about how the four of you were out drinking beer and getting high. About how you were upset because Cheryl Neal had gone out with Tommy Moore, about how fate, cruel and horrible, put Kimi Kanasket in your path.”
His foot continued to bounce. “No,” he said. “I was at home.”
“Maybe that’s what you told Buzz Almond when he came to your house to take pictures of the Bronco, but I know now that was a lie. Darren’s account was very detailed. You got angry. You had a temper then, one you’ve done remarkably well to overcome, it appears, and you chased Kimi into the woods with the Bronco. You didn’t mean to run her down. You weren’t even thinking straight. You were just angry. You were angry a lot back then. You were just a boy, who had to watch his mother die of cancer and grow up without her, trying to live up to his legendary father’s expectations. You were under a lot of pressure and stress. The whole town was expecting a lot of you, in particular. You were the golden boy, the all-American. That’s a lot for any eighteen-year-old’s shoulders to bear. The other three—Darren and Archie and Hastey—they were part of the Four Ironmen, but they didn’t have the same pressures. You were the center of attention. You were the star. I imagine you were feeling the pressure, particularly that night, on the eve of the biggest game in this little town’s history.”
“I told you, Detective, I never put much into all that stuff about being the Four Ironmen and all-American. Those were just labels others placed on us, on me.”
“Maybe you didn’t, but others did. Your father did, and whether you admitted it then or not, you wanted to live up to those expectations. That’s why in the photograph of the four of you with the trophy, the others are smiling, but you just look relieved. I imagine you were—relieved to have the season behind you. Relieved to be moving on, away from Stoneridge, away from the memory of what you’d done, away to college, where you could just blend in. You didn’t mean to run down Kimi. It wasn’t premeditated. It was a horrible thing to have happen. But it happened. And the four of you were scared out of your minds. You didn’t know what to do. Your whole life had changed in an instant—if anyone found out, all the accolades and attention and publicity would be forgotten, replaced by one horrible incident that would forever define you. Eric Reynolds, an all-American with a full ride to the University of Washington—a murderer, a felon who threw away his life because he couldn’t control his temper.”
Reynolds looked like he’d taken a sedative, only partially present in the room, as Tracy continued to recount what transpired that night. Tracy had no doubt the part of him not present had gone back to the clearing, back forty years, to that horrible moment. And she had no doubt that, despite all of his seeming success and wealth, that he’d gone back to that night many times. He just hid it better in public than the others, hid it behind the fa?ade he’d created, behind the big house and the successful business and the gregarious personality, but Eric Reynolds was riddled with guilt. That was the reason he lived alone, unmarried, without children, unable to sleep. That was why the gun was on the poker table, and Tracy bet it had been on that table many other nights.
“Kimi threw herself in the river,” he said. “She was upset because Tommy Moore came into the diner that night with Cheryl Neal.”
“And I’m sure you want to believe that, Eric. I’m sure that over the years you’ve done everything you could to try to convince yourself that’s what happened. Because the alternative was waking up every morning thinking you’d killed that girl—and that would have been just too horrible to face. That’s what our minds do. They protect us. They bury those memories that would cripple us, so that we can live with ourselves.” She looked to the still image of Bradley Cooper. “Soldiers understand it. They’re asked to do horrible things. They see horrible things. And they wonder if that makes them horrible people. Does doing a horrible thing make you a horrible person?”
“What’s the answer, Detective?”
“You didn’t mean to kill Kimi Kanasket—not when you ran her over. That was an accident, an accident as a result of a bad decision fueled by testosterone and anger and drugs, but it certainly wasn’t intentional. It didn’t make you a murderer, Eric. And if you and the others had just owned up to what you did that night, Darren and Archie would likely still be alive, and Hastey wouldn’t have spent his life crawling into a beer can every day, and you wouldn’t be living out here alone.